Requiem For A Forgotten Shrine

For 12 Years, Miami's Freedom Towerwas A Turnstile To Liberty.half

A Million Refugees Passedthrough Its Doors.now Its Halls Stand

Silent And Deserted.

June 29, 1986|By Robert A. Liff of the Sentinel Staff

HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of the huddled masses -- the tired and the poor -- were processed into America through its high-ceilinged rooms. And the elite of a nation -- doctors, lawyers and businessmen -- were welcomed by its towering presence on the bay.

This bay was not New York harbor, however, but Miami's Biscayne Bay.

The teeming shore from which the immigrants came was not somewhere in Europe but just across the Straits of Florida, in Cuba.

And the welcoming structure was not a torch-bearing Statue of Liberty or cavernous Ellis Island, but Florida's own version of those landmarks: the Freedom Tower.

Florida's Freedom Tower was created in 1962, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service took over the old, empty Miami News headquarters to deal with the floodtide of Cuban refugees pouring into Miami after Fidel Castro's communist regime had taken control of the revolution that, in 1959, ousted dictator Fulgencio Batista.

By the time the building was abandoned again in 1974, it was estimated that 463,854 refugees had been processed through its halls.

And while millions flock to lower Manhattan this week to celebrate the 100th birthday of the renovated Statue of Liberty, Miami's version of the lady with the lamp will languish as a 61-year-old, deserted, bedraggled shell, its recent history a humbling morass of foreclosure and litigation.

The 15-story, 283-foot-high Spanish renaissance revival-style building was Miami's first skyscraper, an architectural landmark modeled after the Giralda Tower in Seville, Spain. Its decrepit state saddens its ''alumni'' who entered its labyrinthine, bureaucratic lines as foreigners, and left one step closer to American citizenship.

''I think the Freedom Tower has for South Florida the same meaning that the Statue of Liberty has for millions of Europeans who came through Ellis Island,'' says Eduardo Padron, 40, a vice-president of Miami-Dade Community College.

In 1962, Padron was a 15-year-old boy sent with his brother from Cuba to stay with friends in Miami. His parents, blocked from leaving at the time, followed a year later. For Padron, and for the thousands of other Cubans who found a new life on the other side of the hours-long lines that snaked through the tower's lower floors, the Freedom Tower is more than just another government building.

''I would love to take my grandson there and say, 'This is where it all started for me,' '' he says.

While some of the earliest Cuban refugees came by ship, most came by airplane, taking the 45-minute hop on Pan Am flights that were ended by President Eisenhower in late 1960. Another quarter-million refugees came by air during the special ''freedom flights'' between 1965 and 1973. The preliminary paperwork on the arriving airplane passengers was done at Miami International Airport, which a Miami Herald editorial writer in 1961 called ''our own Brandenburg gate,'' a reference to the crossing point between East and West in the divided city of Berlin. But the bulk of the processing was done at the Freedom Tower.

By the time of the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when another 125,000 Cubans fled from the small port west of Havana to Key West, the Freedom Tower was forgotten, just one more shuttered and garbage-strewn building in a northern part of downtown Miami still trying to resurrect itself to match the highrise glamor of central downtown just four blocks to the south.

Padron, who entered the United States through the Freedom Tower, now wants to come full circle by taking over the building for the Miami-Dade Community College.

He is spearheading an effort to have the state buy the building from its current owners, a consortium of developers that include state Sen. Jack Gordon, D-Miami Beach, who have been unable to come up with a financially viable plan to either maintain it or redevelop it. Padron wants it to be a school of the arts, with a museum highlighting its history and housing the art collection of benefactor Mitchell Wolfson, founder of the Wometco entertainment empire.

But in part because of politics, in part because of tight budgets and in part because of unease at the legislature paying one of its own members for the building, the Freedom Tower's sad status quo seems likely to continue.

An earlier attempt by the Freedom Tower Cuban Committee -- a group of one- time refugees who have found success in the United States -- to buy the building after it was vacated by the federal government also collapsed in 1976. Plans then called for the refugees to raise $1.8 million to buy it from its owner, a New York City attorney, and then give it to the United States government as a bicentennial gift.

But it was not to be. Neither that plan, nor a later plan by the current owners to construct a glass-and-steel highrise that would have incorporated into its design the facade of the tower, came to fruition.